The Advocacy Sourcebook - WaterAid

118 Pages·2012·0.49 MB·English

The Advocacy Sourcebook
“We shall not finally defeat AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, or any of
the other infectious diseases that plague the developing world until
we have also won the battle for safe drinking-water, sanitation and
basic healthcare.”
Kofi Annan, Former United Nations Secretary-General
The Advocacy Sourcebook is
not designed to be read from
start to end in one sitting!
• If you want to understand what advocacy is
see section 1
• If you want to know why we do advocacy
see section 2
• If you want to start developing your
advocacy plans
see sections 3 and 4
• If you want to make advocacy happen
see sections 5 and 6
• If you want to choose from some advocacy tools
see the toolkit

 The Advocacy Sourcebook
Contents
Preface
7
Introduction
8
How to use The Advocacy Sourcebook
9
Section 1 An introduction to advocacy
11
Government and governance 11
The problem of politics and power 12
Spaces for civil society participation 1
How does policy evolve? 14
Accountability and legitimacy 15
Linking local, national and international advocacy 15
Section 2 WaterAid and advocacy
17
Why WaterAid does advocacy 17
The need for good WSS governance and investment 18
What is blocking good WSS governance and investment? 19
WSS and the UN Millennium Development Goals 21
Section  Rooted advocacy
25
Building community capacity for rooted advocacy 26
Section 4 Planning for advocacy
29
The advocacy planning cycle 29
Identifying the issues 1
Researching the issues 2
Tools for analysing the issues 6
Setting objectives 42
Identifying targets 4
Clarifying your message 47
Section 5 Making advocacy happen
5
What resources and capacity do you have for advocacy? 54
Forging the right relationships with allies 56
Creating alliances 58
Planning for action 60
Planning for monitoring and evaluation 6

Section 6 Advocacy actions
65
Lobbying 65
Public campaigning 69
Using the media 7
Pushing the message 74
Video and drama/street theatre 76
Section 7 Monitoring and evaluation
79
Monitoring 79
Evaluation 80
What is the difference between monitoring and evaluation? 80
What aspects of advocacy work can be monitored and evaluated? 8
What are the challenges of monitoring and evaluating advocacy work? 8
How can you review progress in advocacy work? 8
Section 8 Further information resources
86
Annexe Advocacy toolkit
90
 WaterAid research planning table 90
 Some guiding considerations for a research Terms of Reference (ToR) 9
 The problem and solution tree 94
4 The RAPID table 96
5 Water supply and sanitation (WSS) stakeholders 97
6 Stakeholder analysis table 98
7 Comprehensive target analysis 99
8 Sample advocacy budget 00
9 Questions of good governance for alliances 0
0 Simple advocacy action plan 0
 WaterAid advocacy programme plan (APP) 04
 WaterAid protocol on public campaigning 07
 Tips on good press releases 08
4 Sample press release 09
5 Writing worth reading 0
6 Tips for public speaking 4
7 Sample lobby brief 5
4 The Advocacy Sourcebook
Case studies
Raising grassroots voices to government in Madagascar 26
FEDWASUN in Nepal 28
Getting the timing right in Ghana 31
Creating credible alternatives in Karachi 34
Analysing policy vs practice in Mozambique 42
Tanzanian government as target and influential 47
UWASNET in Uganda 7
The Freshwater Action Network 9
Reforming public utilities to meet the water and sanitation MDGs 66
Using project visits in Bangladesh 68
The Advocacy Sourcebook 
Acknowledgements
Written by: Mary O’Connell
Grateful thanks are due to the following in the production of The Advocacy Sourcebook:
Belinda Calaguas. David Matthews, Abdul Nash Mohammed, James Wicken, Danielle Morley,
Dominick de Waal, Henry Northover and Jerry Adams.
Editors: Gideon Burrows and Libby Plumb.
Published by:
WaterAid
47-49 Durham Street
London
SE11 5JD
UK
Tel: + 44 (0)20 7793 4500
www.wateraid.org
UK charity registration no 288701
September 2007
The reproduction and distribution of materials within The Advocacy Sourcebook is permissible
where an appropriate credit is given.
6 The Advocacy Sourcebook
Preface
WaterAid was founded in 1981 by men and women in the British water industry with a passion and
commitment to improve public health. In many respects, the industry is the great inheritor of 19th
century public health engineering projects that changed the lives of the UK population, of which
vast numbers lived in Dickensian slums, where disease ran rife due to a lack of safe water and the
presence of open sewers.
Today, over 1.1 billion people around the world do not have access to safe water and over
2.6 billion do not have access to safe sanitation. Clearly, this situation is a continuing 21st century
scandal.
As WaterAid has grown in experience, reputation and capability, we have learnt that funding
improved water and sanitation projects, while important in its own right, is an insufficient
response to the need to meet people’s rights to sufficient, affordable, accessible, safe and
acceptable water and sanitation services.
WaterAid’s vision is of a world where everyone has access to safe water and sanitation. To achieve
this, the causes that prevent a third of the world from enjoying these fundamental rights must
be tackled. However, these causes go beyond bad practices and badly designed programmes.
They exist in the legal, economic, political, cultural and social inequalities of societies where
WaterAid works, and throughout the rest of the developing world. They are not limited to policies
in water and sanitation but include policies that affect people’s access to water and sanitation,
for example, policies and programmes for poverty eradication, trade and investment. They
include inequalities between classes, genders, ethnicities and other social groups, that lead to
the marginalisation of vulnerable people. They include the quality of government, as well as the
quality of governance, the ability (or lack thereof) of poor people to have a voice and the means
to hold their governments to account. They include unequal relationships and imbalances of
power between the rich industrialised countries of the ‘North’ and the developing countries of the
‘South’.
Together with a growing number of development NGOs, WaterAid is committed to carrying
out advocacy work in order to maximise the impact of its programme activities and to meet
global water, sanitation and hygiene needs. This commitment reflects the corporate aims of the
organisation, which include, ‘influencing national policies and practices so that the poor gain
access to safe, affordable, accessible and sustainable water supply, sanitation and hygiene
promotion services’.
The Advocacy Sourcebook is not only a resource for WaterAid staff and its project partners, but for
anyone who wants to understand, plan and carry out advocacy work systematically and effectively.
WaterAid is committed to challenging the barriers that prevent access to essential water
and sanitation services. We hope that this updated edition of The Advocacy Sourcebook will
provide you with the ideas, methods and tools to take action in local campaigns or international
movements that make a difference when it comes to who can turn on a tap or go to the toilet with
comfort and dignity.
Stephen Turner
Director of Public Policy and Education
WaterAid
The Advocacy Sourcebook 
Introduction
The Advocacy Sourcebook is for anyone who wants to change the lives of the poorest people in
the world.
In this context, advocacy is the planning and carrying out of actions that seek to change policy,
attitudes and practice in favour of the poor. It can take many forms, from face to face discussions
with politicians to mounting a media campaign to raise public awareness of the issues.
For WaterAid, the key foundation of all advocacy work is grassroots community involvement. It is
only by involving communities and people affected by the issues themselves, and empowering
them and increasing their capacity to act and advocate for themselves, that change can really take
place.
It is this grassroots work that gives advocacy actions their credibility, and which makes achieving
advocacy aims much more likely.
The primary aim of The Advocacy Sourcebook is to assist WaterAid staff and partner organisations
in drawing up advocacy action plans that aim to improve the water supply and sanitation situation
of the poorest people in the countries where they work.
However, The Advocacy Sourcebook is written and structured so as to be useful to any individual,
group or organisation seeking to carry out advocacy work on their own issues in any country in the
world.
Throughout, we provide concrete examples of WaterAid and its partners’ advocacy work in
practice to inform and demonstrate what effective advocacy looks like.
At the end of the report, we provide some tools, pro-formas, tables and diagrams which advocacy
workers may like to reproduce, adapt or distribute; or merely to use as a basis to create
something more tailored to their own advocacy campaign.
We hope you find it useful, and welcome any suggestions for improvement or contributions for
future issues.
8 The Advocacy Sourcebook